If U.S. investors stopped trusting the market, the world’s economy would collapse.  During the great depression stocks lost 85% of their value causing a public outrage directed at the U.S. Government.  The collapse was fueled by company fraud, over-speculation, stock manipulation, and dishonest brokers.  Over lapping today’s financial crisis, one can’t help but see the [...]

 
Obama’s energy, environment strategies to be ‘mixed bag’
Nick Snow
Washington Editor
WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 20 — As Barack H. Obama was sworn in Jan. 20 as the 44th US president, his administration announced an energy and environment program with provisions directly affecting the oil and gas industry in several areas.
The strategy aims to save more oil than [...]

The First Ten Senate Bills
A Democratic aide on the hill passes along the first ten bills that Majority Leader Harry Reid will put in the hopper this evening to kick off the new session of Congress, as sent by leadership to various Senate Legislative Directors. Unfortunately for us, the bills are placeholders that only contain [...]

President Bush signed a new law on December 23, 2008 that waives the required minimum distribution (RMD) for qualified retirement plans and individual retirement accounts (IRA’S).  The law requires certain employees and individuals to receive a minimum distribution by April 1st. following the year they attain the age of 70 1/2 and each December 31st. [...]

The recent moves of the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to zero percent floating from .25% is historical  in the sense that it is the first time in modern history that the United States of America succombs to a Japanese type policy.  The issue is how does Japan react, the yen, Euro, England, Swiss [...]

A short summary of the economic history of the past few months is grim.

Credit, when it is available, has become dramatically more expensive for all borrowers, and some worry it will get even more expensive in 2009.
U.S. stock markets have lost more than 40% of their value over the past year, and markets elsewhere in [...]

Retail Sales and Prices Confirm What We Already Know
November producer prices dropped more than 2%, but edged up slightly excluding oil, and retail sales fell. The drop in retail sales was somewhat less than expected, buoyed by the push to buy on sale on Black Friday. The data on October retail sales, however, was revised [...]

The recent issues surrounding the credit crisis have moved the attention of the global citizenry away from rising sea levels.  We have bullet pointed a list of facts courtesy of future sea level, a non profit dedicated to helping turn the tide:
Although the United States makes up only about 5 percent of the world’s population, [...]

There is blood on the street, and the stampede continues with equities currently in a self-perpetuating corrective cycle linked to the higher volatility.  The sentiment is driven by the main equity indices, but most of them (such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average) have too few companies making the index.  As the result of the [...]

With worldwide oil and gas demand pushing against 86 million barrels of oil a day, Canada’s resource rich, investment friendly, region of Alberta strikes a balance between increasingly unpredictable and unstable governments of major oil producing countries.  That is why Canada is the number one oil and gas exporter to the United States of America, [...]